PSP helps out school community
Imani Ongalo
Managing Editor
Members of the Public Service Practicum class help in the school and community with service projects.
Their first service project was raising awareness for the condition of the student parking lot. The parking spots have now been repainted, and students can easily locate the spot they’d purchased prior to this solution.
PSP also had a ‘Knight’ of service on Friday, December 2. Students who signed up participated in an array of community service activities from 5 p.m. to 12 a.m. Students in honor societies could also collect hours for their organizations. They had games and other fun activities between these services in order to make this night fun.
“PSP is a class that is meant to teach students the skills that are required to organize and impact change in the community around them,” said Ashley Kunz, PSP teacher and sponsor.
PSP is a class that is made up of students with the desire to make a change to the school and the community. It involves taking action and is an interactive and creative class that has the students coming up with plans to better our world.
“Our main goal is to better our community school through various service events and projects,” Kunz said.
Their first step in their community driven service is action planning. This lays out the foundation for the process of the service PSP does.
“We always start with an action plan where we have our goals, what we’re trying to get out of it, the tasks we have and for when. We look at the challenges that we may face and the strengths that we have. We try to always start with an action plan so we have some sort of sense as to where we’re going,” Kunz said.
Students get to pitch/choose their ideas for making the community a better place and work to make those goals a reality.
“The students have been really choosing the projects they work on. Everything we are working on so far has been brainstormed by the students and chosen for what they want to do,” Kunz said.
The students are really given the opportunity to take matters into their own hands and work for something they really want.
“It’s so inspiring to be in a class where I can work to do something for a bigger reason. I know it’s not an extremely well-known class, but I’m very proud to be a part of a class that takes such action and has such a passionate drive,” said senior Oviya Gokulakrishnan.
PSP is a full-year class for a social studies credit, and it counts as a social studies course. This year it is held during 5th period, and it is a blended class, so students can go and partake in the tasks they might need to do in order to fulfill their projects. PSP plans its next event for December of this year. This class is not led by “is your project successful or not or how successful is it, it’s more like how well can you best learn from these experiences. It’s more about student growth more than anything,” Kunz said.
